The Record
U.S. Navy armored cruiser, sent to Havana to protect American interests during the Cuban War of Independence. Exploded at her anchor at 21:40 on 15 February 1898; her forward third was torn open and she sank in shallow water. 266 dead, two-thirds of her crew. 'Remember the Maine' became the war cry that pushed the United States into conflict with Spain two months later, though modern analysis suggests the explosion was almost certainly a spontaneous coal bunker fire rather than a Spanish mine.
The Vessel
USS Maine (ACR-1) was a second-class armoured cruiser of the United States Navy, commissioned on 17 September 1895 at the New York Navy Yard. She was 98 metres long, 6,682 tons, with a main battery of four 10-inch guns in two twin turrets. Her design and construction had been one of the most prolonged and contentious projects in late nineteenth-century American naval procurement: she was laid down on 17 October 1888, and the seven years between laying and commissioning represented the slowest construction of any American warship of her generation. The delays had resulted from Congressional funding arguments, armour-plate contract disputes, and continuing technological changes in her specification.
By the time of her commissioning she was already partially obsolete; her class had been planned as the American answer to the 1880s British and European protected cruisers, but naval technology had advanced faster than her construction programme. The Maine was classed as a second-class battleship in her contemporary records and as an armoured cruiser in her modern classification. She was considered the pride of the 1890s American fleet, but she was also the slowest and least militarily effective capital ship in the service.
Her captain at the end of her service was Captain Charles Sigsbee, 52, a career naval officer who had previously commanded the USS Kearsarge and the USS Detroit. Sigsbee was a respected officer and a published marine geophysicist; the Sigsbee Abyssal Plain of the Gulf of Mexico was named after his 1870s bathymetric surveys. He had been assigned to Maine in 1897.
The Voyage
Maine arrived at Havana on 25 January 1898 on a "friendly visit", the euphemistic term for a warship's appearance in a tense foreign port, sent by President William McKinley to protect American citizens and property in Cuba during the accelerating revolt against Spanish colonial rule. The Cuban War of Independence had been underway since 1895; by 1898 the Spanish counterinsurgency under General Valeriano Weyler had produced the "reconcentration" policies that had killed an estimated 400,000 Cuban civilians. American press coverage, particularly the Hearst and Pulitzer yellow-journalism empires, had been building a public case for American intervention since mid-1897.
Maine anchored at Buoy Number 4 in Havana Harbor on 25 January. She remained at anchor for three weeks, conducting shore liberties in restricted conditions, taking on provisions, and observing the political situation in Havana with the kind of visible presence that was the diplomatic purpose of her visit. The Spanish captain-general of Havana, Ramón Blanco y Erenas, received Captain Sigsbee officially; the meeting was polite.
On the evening of 15 February 1898, Maine was anchored in the north part of Havana Harbor, approximately 400 metres from the commercial piers. Her crew had completed their evening colours and most had retired to their hammocks. Captain Sigsbee was writing in his cabin at 21:40 when the first detonation occurred.
The Disaster
The explosion of the USS Maine at 21:40 on 15 February 1898 was felt throughout Havana and recorded on the seismographs at Vieques, Puerto Rico, and at New Orleans. The blast destroyed the forward third of the ship: the forward magazine, the forecastle, and the upper half of the armoured belt were blown away. The ship settled immediately, burning, into the shallow harbour bottom.
266 of the 354 men aboard died. 94 survived, of whom several had been ashore or were able to swim clear. Captain Sigsbee survived, as did most of the officers whose cabins were located aft of the main magazine. The majority of the enlisted crew, quartered in the forward compartments, died in their hammocks or in the seconds immediately following.
The cause of the explosion was contested from the first hours. The Spanish harbour authority's initial investigation, conducted on 16 February, suggested an internal accident. An American Court of Inquiry convened by the Navy Department on 21 February, under Captain William Sampson, produced its report on 21 March 1898: the findings identified the immediate cause as an external mine that had detonated under the forward magazine. The American Court did not identify the party responsible for placing the mine.
The American press did not require the Court to name a Spanish perpetrator. The Hearst and Pulitzer papers had been running "Remember the Maine, and to hell with Spain" as a standing editorial line since the week of the explosion. President McKinley's war message to Congress of 11 April 1898 cited the Maine among the causes for war with Spain. Congress declared war on 25 April. The Spanish-American War that followed, between 25 April and 12 August 1898, resulted in the American annexation of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and in de facto American control of Cuba.
The Legacy
The question of what actually destroyed the Maine has been reopened twice since the 1898 Sampson inquiry. A Navy inquiry in 1911, conducted during the preparation of the Maine's raising from Havana Harbor, found that the explosion had been caused by an external mine but reversed some of the Sampson Court's specific mechanical findings. A 1976 Navy study by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, published under the title How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed, reached the opposite conclusion: that the explosion had almost certainly been caused by a spontaneous combustion fire in the coal bunker adjacent to the forward magazine.
Rickover's methodology, drawing on American and British analyses of bituminous coal bunker fires across the 1890s and 1900s (of which there had been several on other American and British warships of comparable type), and on his own naval engineering expertise, made the spontaneous-ignition hypothesis the modern consensus. The National Geographic Society commissioned a computer simulation in 1999 which modelled both hypotheses and found the internal explosion more consistent with the physical evidence; an advanced analysis by Hansen, Price, and others in 2012, using twenty-first-century forensic modelling of warship coal-bunker fires, confirmed Rickover's 1976 finding.
The modern consensus, therefore, is that the Maine was destroyed by an internal accident, not by Spanish action. This was not the finding of the inquiry that led to the American declaration of war in April 1898.
The wreck of Maine was raised from Havana Harbor in 1911-1912 through a cofferdam operation of unprecedented scale; her hull was brought to the surface, her forward third was identified as having been destroyed by blast damage, and the 64 previously unrecovered bodies of her dead were retrieved for burial. The recovered hull was towed out to sea on 16 March 1912 and deliberately scuttled in 1,200 metres of water outside Havana Harbor with full military honours. Her mast was mounted at Arlington National Cemetery as a memorial. Her anchor and bell were retained and are on display at the National Museum of the United States Navy at the Washington Navy Yard.
The Maine Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery is the grave of her 266 dead. The surrounding memorial plaza is engraved with their names. 260 of the 266 were United States Navy enlisted ratings; the other six were Marines. The memorial has been visited annually by the United States Secretary of the Navy and the Spanish ambassador to the United States since 1998, in a joint service of remembrance; the Spanish state has issued no formal apology for the 1898 war, but has participated in the memorial programme since the centenary.